The Sentence I Kept Serving

Galatians 2:20–21

I have been to prison four times. Two of those stays marked me most deeply, in 2017 and again in 2023. Each time I arrived having already lost everything: the business, the income, my marriage, the assets and, worst of all, myself. Grief, addiction and despair shared that cell with me.

Yet the deepest bondage was not the drugs. It was a quieter habit: self-sabotage. Whenever life began to steady, something in me reached for the hammer. A voice I barely recognised kept whispering, “You don’t deserve peace.” So I kept serving a sentence no judge had handed down, long after the gates had opened.

In those months I recommitted my life to Jesus. But the final breakthrough was humbling. I had to forgive myself, and I had to go to people and ask their forgiveness, for Matthew being Matthew. I could not dig my way out with my own strength; I had tried that for years. What set me free was discovering that Christ had already forgiven me, and that His love was never a reward for good behaviour.

That is Paul’s point to the Galatians. They were trying to earn their standing with God by their own effort. Paul answers with his own death: crucified with Christ. The striving Paul was finished. What remained was a life lived by faith in the Son of God, “who loved me, and gave himself for me.” The law can show us what is broken. It can never make us new (Romans 3:20–22).

Jesus said the same in the week He went to the cross: a kernel of wheat remains a single seed unless it falls into the ground and dies (John 12:24). I used to think I had already died too many deaths: the business, the marriage, my good name. I see now I was refusing the one death that mattered, the death of the self that insisted on running the show, even when running it into the ground.

Today I walk back into Changi on the other side of the bars with Crossroads, opening the Bible with men who carry the same whisper I once did. At TCE I watch Restarters reach the edge of something good and feel the old pull to wreck it. I tell them honestly: I know that voice. It is not the voice of God. The cross has already settled what you deserve.

Where are you still serving a sentence Christ has already served for you? Where has your own strength run out? Perhaps that is exactly the ground where the seed must fall, and where new life begins.